Welcome to American Book Arts, a fine bindery located in Tuscaloosa, AL. I'm Claire, and I make all the journals offered here. Each journal is unique down to the materials and made to last. They make excellent gifts. I take commissions.
I am also a freelance designer and writer with several years of experience creating websites, advertising materials, and business copy.
Leather Journals
When I make a leather journal, I envision the completed whole and tweak the design until I find the best possible book for a given piece of leather. My work features details such as contrast color stitching along the spine, intriguing pairings of leathers with different colors and textures, hand cut organic shapes, innovative clasps to hold the book closed, and decorative elements such as shells or beads. These journals contain 240 pages of text weight acid-free soft white paper stitched directly to the leather using dyed Irish linen thread, a natural fiber thread which is both very durable and beautiful. All of the leather is genuine high quality cowhide special ordered from a leather company in Maine.
From an animal-friendly standpoint, when I work with leather, I purchase the material that larger commercial endeavors discard, not because of quality, but because it isn't enough hide to cover larger items. Then I use every possible scrap.
Link Stitch Journals
When I craft link stitch journals, I choose my components with the same consideration for quality, beauty, and durability. Each journal contains 160 pages of the paper used in the leather journals and is sewn with Irish linen thread. I use professional quality binders board for the covers and a wide array of decorative papers, including hand marbled papers and Chiyogami, a hand silkscreened Japanese paper like the one pictured here.
If you happened to have a paper you love and wanted to have a book made out of it, depending upon the durability, opacity, grain, size and weight of the paper, it might be possible to commission a unique book. The same is true for journals based on a certain theme. For example, I recently made a giraffe-themed journal. In some cases I can work with silhouettes and solid colors to build a simple theme when no commercial paper fits the specific design needs of a desired journal.
Why handmade?
The standard of craftsmanship for my journals is superior to the machine made or mass produced journals on the market. Aesthetics aside, if you look at the way the pages are held together in a given journal or book, you'll notice that they've been either folded and glued together, or completely cut and glued together. There's usually no sewing. The only thing holding your pages in is glue, and every single time you open that journal, you are slowly destroying the only thing holding it together.
Since the paper inside my books is folded and sewn, the natural fibers remain intact. You can open them completely flat as often as you'd like without doing the binding any damage. My books are just sturdier. I have tested them. The leather journal I used was suede-side out. It was tossed in a bag and carted with all my other belongings all over town for several months. It was all but beaten to death, and the only visible damage is where the ink bled and the pages wrinkled slightly after it got wet in a storm. Each piece of leather will age according to its unique characteristics, but you can trust the whole book to hang together. My link stitch journal suffered similar use and only has a little wear along the edges of the cover, like any well made hardback book. Link stitch bindings look delicate, but it's an illusion. They're remarkably tough.
Any purchase of handmade crafts usually supports individual artists, as opposed to corporate interests. Your purchases make it possible for artists like me to continue investing time and resources into art.